I'm late to this, but I just love the fact that Jerome Corsi, of all people, now thinks there might have been something fishy about how George W. Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard.

Yeah, that Jerome Corsi -- the guy who wrote the Swift Boat book and helped get Bush reelected.

He and Joseph Farah have been publishing stories at WorldNetDaily about Harriet Miers's tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission. (To put it mildly, they're no fans of Miers.) They assert that former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes engaged in shady business practices as a lobbyist for the company that ran the state's lottery, GTECH, and that Miers looked the other way -- which is interesting if true, because Barnes says he was the guy who pulled strings to get George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam, and perhaps the administration of a governor with higher political ambitions didn't want to give Barnes a reason to want to go public with such recollections.

Farah writes:

Corsi ... wonders out loud whether Barnes may have been telling the truth about his involvement in securing Bush a spot in the National Guard.

"The Barnes melodrama got drowned out by the forged document saga, but to this day, nobody has disproved Barnes played the role he said he did," writes Corsi....

Barnes had been hired first by GTECH because of his relationship with former Gov. Ann Richards. When Richards was replaced by George W. Bush in 1995, he boasted to the company that he knew the Bush family well. He explained that Bush family friend Sidney Adger approached him in 1968 to ask Barnes to use his influence to make sure George W. Bush was admitted to the Texas Air National Guard....

"GTECH further dodged a bullet when the Texas Lottery Commission, including Harriet Miers, decided to end the competitive bidding and re-award the contract to GTECH, deciding not to pursue the lower-price competitive bids that were on the table," Corsi reports. "In the period of 1995-1997, the George Bush controversy over the National Guard had not yet surfaced to be vetted. Was there a cover-up going on? That's a reasonable question given what we've uncovered so far." ...